Sometimes, Margaret Atwood gets a little goofy.
Thank goodness, though, that the author of The Handmaid’s Tale writes intelligent works of dystopian fiction with a sense of humor. Otherwise, the end of the world might be unbearably grim.
Her latest novel, MaddAddam, concludes the trilogy begun with Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued in The Year of the Flood (2009). The titles of the second and third books refer to the origin and Noah stories of the Bible.
Her flood, a plague, is caused by a brilliant geneticist playing God — a man called Crake who tries to eliminate humans while creating a better species. The surviving members of a fringe environmental group address their senior men as Adam and women as Eve.
The biblical echoes are far from holy, however: A key locale is a high-end sex club called Scales and Tails, where the acts incorporate snakes. Temptation, indeed.
In Atwood’s near-ish future, global warming has reshaped the landscape. The rich are ensconced in walled enclaves of plenty, while everyone else is left to “pleeblands” — degraded former cities and suburbs rampant with lawlessness.
Animals are going extinct at a quick clip, while strange, sick hybrids are being genetically engineered to amuse and feed humans; military forces and the state have essentially become one.
Then things get even worse: A plague hits and kills almost everyone, leaving a ruined, pillaged world.
When MaddAddam begins, the survivors — a few geneticists and environmentalists — have assembled and are ready to start anew. They’re accompanied by the Crakers, the genetically engineered humanoid naifs who were designed to inherit Earth but might be too innocent to survive.
MaddAddam will be decipherable to those who haven’t read the other books, yet those who have won’t be bored.
With puns and wordplay, Atwood pokes fun at our reality through the bleak future she has imagined. She prefers the term “speculative fiction” to “science fiction” because, since The Handmaid’s Tale, she sees her novels as extrapolations of the present into a possible future.
Despite being almost depleted of its natural resources, the exhausted Earth seems to be on track for a recovery in MaddAddam. The new climate brings thunderstorms every day and lots of kudzu, and the few animals that escaped extinction are coexisting with their genetically modified brothers. The new world includes glow-in-the-dark rabbits; scentless rakunks (half-skunk, half-raccoon); liobams; wolvogs; and pigoons.
After thousands of pages of complex world-building, readers might expect a whiz-bang finale — something that Atwood doesn’t build into MaddAddam. In fact, her storytelling choices and strategies leave the novel seeming less urgent than the earlier ones. Characters once resourceful and desperate to survive now mill and mope. When serious conflict finally arrives, it is hidden within layers of storytelling — conveyed as a veiled, soft-focus legend.
Yet the imaginative universe that Atwood has created in these books is huge. It’s a dystopia but a dystopia that’s rather funny.
Atwood doesn’t just ask what if; she raises an eyebrow and says, “See where we’re going?”